Senescence

Dovid lives in a perfect world, free of crime, war, or poverty, and everyone is given everything they could possibly need. The only thing that could be considered wrong with this world (and there is no-one really that engages in such consideration) is that before you reach the age of sixteen you will lose one of your senses. Your eyes will fall out, or your nose will slide off, your tongue will decompose, your ears will rip free, or your skin will rot and harden into scar tissue. And nobody thinks this is strange.

People are given technological upgrades instead, that simulate the old sense-perception, and many even say improves upon it. In fact Dovid is distraught that he is the oldest person in the world at sixteen to have not received a single inability; he is abnormally normal. He lives a standard life in his self-sustaining island, which he never needs to leave, and has companionship in the form of his walls and their various smiley face facades. Dovid’s social interactions are limited to communications with his eyeless brother Mart, until his sixteenth birthday, when Dovid is convinced to leave his island and venture to a Physical Leisure Segment: a place where people are made to actually interact with other people in the flesh. The four options for this physical interaction are sexual, narcotic, violent or gluttonous; things that every normal person apparently does.

But what if Dovid is not normal? What if he has already received his inability and it is not the ability of sight or sound or touch or taste or smell. What if it is a sense of perception beyond those standard five, and worse, what if there are others like him?